RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2021/09/27/the-collapse-of-bidens-world-n1481335

Despite his vow to “build back better,” China is forcing all of Joe Biden’s moves. The Asian giant’s decision to pursue its own climate policy, consisting largely of more industrialization with green trimmings, effectively kills the Paris accords, so long a part of the progressive platform.  How could it not? Beijing produces more emissions than the EU and U.S. combined.

“In 2019, China’s emissions not only eclipsed that of the US — the world’s second-largest emitter at 11% of the global total — but also, for the first time, surpassed the emissions of all developed countries combined … When added together, GHG emissions from all members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as well as all 27 EU member states, reached 14,057 MMt CO2e in 2019, about 36 MMt CO2e short of China’s total.”

Not only is climate change DOA, but the post-WW2 alliance structure is in the ICU. China’s naval expansion pushed Washington to undercut the planned Australian purchase of French conventional submarines in favor of U.K.-U.S. nuclear designs. “For Mr. Macron, the [AUKUS] submarine debacle demonstrates that the NATO alliance is debilitated to the point of dysfunction through lack of trust. The glue has gone. Without transparency — and in the submarine deal there was none — alliance, in the French view, becomes an empty word.”

The “glue” that held NATO together was fear of the Soviet bear. But that once formidable bruin is mangy and supplanted by the much more formidable CCP dragon. The decline of European alliances reflects the strategic primacy of Asia. The irony was that up until Kevin Rudd became PM, Australia actually wanted to become part of Asia. But Chinese expansionism changed all that and stirred in the Aussie breast the old but not wholly forgotten memories of alliances with the English-speaking world.

But the ultimate blow to Biden’s Global World has been to its economic underpinnings. China had been going broke gradually, then all of a sudden. “The roots of the crisis date to [Chinese] tax reforms in 1994 which bolstered central government coffers but left local governments reliant on land financing for revenue.” By China’s own reckoning, the country’s vaunted economic growth rested on three huge bubbles that, once exploded, could threaten the Party’s own legitimacy. “This year, Xi has set out to reform the ‘three huge mountains’ of housing, education and healthcare to rein in soaring costs for city dwellers as a way to shore up legitimacy as the ‘people’s leader’, analysts said.”

The Communist Party encouraged the bubbles in order to tax them. But now, with the stream of new business finally exhausted and the entire edifice threatening to collapse like a house of cards, Chairman Xi has suddenly rediscovered Maoism.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/democrats_hyperbole_is_an_attack_on_the_us_language_history_sanity.html

Maxine Waters, bastion of sanity that she is, recently called an image of a U.S. Border Control officer using his horse to try to prevent an illegal Haitian migrant from entering America a “whipping.” She also said it was “worse than what we witnessed in slavery.” Really? Why then are literally millions of non-Caucasian people desperately attempting to enter the country?

During the slavery era, the “Underground Railroad” was employed to bring escaped slaves to the North and out of bondage. Today, countless thousands of non-Caucasians are traveling into supposedly racist America. Are they all stupid? Masochists?

The American South of the mid-1800s didn’t need to build a wall to keep slaves out. It did everything it could to keep them in. Today, the U.S. desperately needs to complete a wall to keep people out. These facts alone prove the lie behind the “America is systemically racist hoax” being perpetrated by the utterly corrupt government-media-big tech-academia complex.   

Democrats now routinely employ unhinged, preposterous language in what should be a laughable attempt to smear all things Republican/Trumpian/traditional. It is as vile as it is ridiculous. Unfortunately, many people have been so dumbed down by government schools and the Democrat-owned corporate media that they can no longer tell the difference between bold-faced lies and the truth…or discern fantasy from reality.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/09/the_little_caf_that_almost_cou

A Kansas City café defies county health authorities with unfortunate results.

A recent story out of Kansas City, the town in which I live, suggests just how eager the Left is to control our lives, right down to the food we eat. The story involves a friendly hole-in-the-wall café whose brave proprietor had had enough.

A little background is in order. In 2008, I somehow emerged as the public face of the opposition to a ballot measure that called for a ban on smoking in bars and restaurants in Kansas City. What made this unusual, and what made me an effective spokesman, was that I never smoked. Well, not that effective—my side lost the election, narrowly.

My side, as I saw it, was not pro-smoking, but pro-freedom. I argued that no law prevented entrepreneurs from banning smoking in their establishments, and no law forced anyone to eat or drink at a place where others smoked. Indeed, once I saw the election results, I half-regretted not having opened a non-smoking restaurant of my own.

Unfortunately, freedom is a much scarcer commodity today than in 2008. Back then, health officials used their bully pulpit to persuade citizens. These officials had one set of solid facts on their side, namely that smoking is dangerous, and one set of dubious assertions, namely that second-hand smoke is a health hazard. In 2008, citizens were allowed to weigh the evidence.

In 2020, although all the evidence was dubious, we were allowed to weigh nothing. There were no petitions to sign about coronavirus restrictions, no ballots to cast. Even if there had been a vote, a tightly controlled media, local and national, actively censored information that conflicted with an official orthodoxy that changed from week to week.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/26/the-symptoms-of-our-insanity/

Think for a minute.  

When did we become a nation of socialist AOCs wearing “Tax the Rich” dresses to $35,000-a-ticket celebrity galas, without mandatory masks, while being served by masked servants—a now tired script from the Obama birthday bash crowd to the grandees at the Emmys?  

When did we discover that we must listen to oppressed billionaire Oprah from her $90 million Montecito estate commiserating with a billionaire Lebron or royal Meghan Markle about the racist white establishment? Is there anyone in the recent Washington intelligence and investigatory hierarchy who has not lied or feigned loss of memory under oath—a low bar that nevertheless excludes, among others, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Robert Mueller, or Peter Strzok? 

Did anyone just five years ago believe the following could possibly happen in America—and invoke almost no popular outrage from a somnolent public? 

Item: The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, does not deny that: 1) he deliberately aborted the legal chain of operational command—that is, violated the law—by recalibrating established protocols for using nuclear weapons in times of crisis. And he says his interventions were based on his own diagnoses (after prompting from opposition leader, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) that the commander-in-chief was crazy, and thus could be circumvented.  

And 2), in freelancing style, Milley, on more than one occasion, called the top figure of the Chinese Communist People’s Liberation Army, General Li Zuocheng. He reportedly announced that his own country was currently in crisis (experiencing “messy” democracy), reassuring the Chinese that if he, Milley, the newfound autokrator, sensed there was any chance of hostile and aggressive action on the part of his own country, then on his own initiative he would tip off the Chinese in advance. And far from resigning or being fired for his Strangelovian efforts, Milley would then be hailed as a hero by the popular media and progressive civil libertarians. In other words, for the Left, it is as if Burt Lancaster’s movie character, Air Force General James Mattoon Scott, was the real hero of Seven Days in May. 

Milley has also become the Zelig or Forrest Gump of our times. He turns up at almost all our recent military melodramas and disasters. Milley appears variously in the photo-op/federal troops/tear-gas spoof, the virtue-signaled rumored resignation, the talking referent in anonymously sourced books, puff-piece op-eds, and backgrounder quotes, the Inspector Javert of “white rage,” the student of How To Be An Antiracist, the Afghanistan progress reassurer, the “righteous” drone striker, the adjudicator between January 6 “coups” and 120 days of “penny packet protests” costing $2 billion-dollars in riot and arson destruction and 28 deaths, the Article 88 violator, the reductio ad Hitlerum promulgator, and the underappreciated but rumored polymath bibliophile.